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| Stilt-walking at the Faire, 1970s |
I was born the year before WWII ended, and have since led what many people seem to consider a varied and colorful life.
I can’t remember when friends
first started telling me that I should write my memoirs, but in 2015, I began
posting brief chapters of reminiscence each week as “Throwback Thursday” essays
on Facebook.
Before long, readers started
telling me that I should compile these essays into a book. While a nice idea,
this was impractical because of the sheer number of photos, many in color,
involved in over 200 (and counting) essays.
I next considered a website,
but upon inquiry, discovered that setting one up would be a very expensive
proposition, and I’d still have to do most of the work anyway.
Since I’ve long been familiar
with the elements of the free online tool Blogger™, I decided to turn the memoir essays into linked sections, each containing
about 20-30 stories. (Apologies for any disparity in type size as a result of importing material from other sources)
These tales are not in any
kind of autobiographical order. Many of them are about fascinating people I’ve
known, including members of my family. Some are based on my own artwork. They're all just the tiniest bit outrageous.
Welcome to my past.
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| Photo by Laura Goldman |
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. COLLAGE BY COINCIDENCE: ROMANCING THE GRAVE
2. COUNTRY TIME FOR RONNIE: HUTS PONY WAGON VEGGIES JEEP GUMP BAR’L & TURTLE
3. ROBERT SHIELDS: MY LIFE AS A ROBOT
4. GETTING CROCHETY WITH RAM DASS
5. TUTU BLUES: MY LIFE AS A BALLERINA (NOT)
6. WHAT A QUEER BIRD THE FROG ARE
7. INTERLOCKEN THEATER MAGIC, OR, HOW'D THEY DO THAT?
8. A COSMIC GIGGLE ON THE FAULT LINE
9. THREE BARRELS OF SAUERKRAUT AND AN ALLIGATOR
10. THE KEMMERERS GET THEIR PHOTO MADE
11. HANGIN' WITH THE DEAD: A SHORT STRANGE TRIP
12. MOMMY, WHY IS OUR CHURCH BLUE?
13. THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LITTLE JACK
14. SARAPANDY: NOT YOUR AVERAGE BEAR
15. BOBBIE'S WEDDING; A FIFTIES TIME CAPSULE
16. PENNSYLVANIA TOM THUMB WEDDING, OR, MY VERY FIRST
17. FLAMES, MACHETES, GIANT CHICKENS AND PHILOSOPHY: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RAY JASON
18. SCOTT BEACH, RENAISSANCE DUDE
19. SURVIVING THE TOAD
20. THE RING OF TRUTH AND THE IRONY OF ICONS
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COLLAGE BY COINCIDENCE: ROMANCING THE GRAVE
This piece of artwork was an exercise in serendipity. First, while cleaning out some files in 2010, I re-discovered a newspaper clipping from February 2007, concerning a pair of 5000-year-old skeletons found unexpectedly by Italian workers excavating for a factory under construction in Mantua, Italy.
The location of this find happened to be about 25 miles from Verona, where William Shakespeare had set his immortal tale of two doomed young lovers, thus the embracing skeletons quickly became known as the “Neolithic Romeo and Juliet.”
When I tried to make a copy of the newspaper photograph on my aged printer, I inadvertently pushed the “color” button instead of the black-and-white option.
The printer then malfunctioned, producing the lovely division of color and shading seen here. What else could I do but wreath the lovers in matching flowers and set them against a romantic night sky?
I believe that it was my friend Tom Wagner who happened to see this collage and provided it with a name: “Night of the Loving Dead.”
May they rest in supreme serendipity.
#######################
2. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s
Hill, Pennsylvania; Summer 1965
COUNTRY TIME FOR RONNIE: HUTS PONY WAGON VEGGIES JEEP GUMP BAR’L & TURTLE
In 1955, my parents signed us up as
a host family with the Fresh Air Fund, an admirable organization founded in
1877 to provide disadvantaged New York City children with a summer time-out in
the country.
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| Ronnie Kutza (center) arriving at the Easton train station. Brother David and my mother can be seen to the left of the guy in the hat. |
We kids (I was 11 years old; my
sister Susan was 14, my brother David, five) were half expecting some tough
street-wise little city dweller who might think we were hicks. Instead we got
Veronika “Ronnie” Kutza, one of the youngest of a large Polish immigrant family
living on the upper west side of Manhattan.
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| Girl meets turtle. |
Riding
in the grain wagon. The young man is Andy "Gump" McCloughan, one of a
gang of neighborhood boys who rode motorcycles and hired out to do farm
chores. (Andy Gump was a popular cartoon and radio character from
1917-1959.) My dad didn't farm, but rented out fields to neighbors.
When she first showed up, Ronnie was
a little bit scared and a lot shy. We were barely able to coax a smile from
her, so we set out to show her that life in the country could be fun.
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| My dad's jeep (with Ronnie, me and David) was a 1943 retired Army vehicle that was a rolling definition of "rattletrap." Its previous owner had bolted on a makeshift tin top and painted it an eye-searing green with bright yellow trim. My dad used it like a tractor to pull a gang mower to cut our two acres of lawn (he loved lawns, and mowing was how he relaxed after a long day at work). We kids handled the smaller areas with a little power mower. |
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| Pastoral scene: two girls watching a combine at work. |
We went swimming and fishing in our
pond; rode a neighbor’s pony; built huts in the woods; harvested vegetables and
fruits from the garden; drove my dad’s jeep (in low gear) around an empty
field; watched a combine threshing and rode in a grain cart; found a turtle;
put on a show; and went on an outing to Bushkill Park, founded in 1902 and full
of vintage rides and amusements (its “Bar’l of Fun” funhouse was one of the
oldest in the US, and still a winner.)
In
the eponymous "Bar'l of Fun:" me, Ronnie, David, Susan. It was a big
wooden barrel with a polished wood interior, rotating
constantly to deposit one at its bottom. Don't ask me why it was so much
fun, but it was. There was also an enormous wooden slide.
The rest of the funhouse was on the spooky/disorienting side: tilting stairs, goofy mirrors, rolling hallways, a "bucking bronco" with a rolling midsection (a lawsuit waiting to happen), dark corners, and strange noises.
The rest of the funhouse was on the spooky/disorienting side: tilting stairs, goofy mirrors, rolling hallways, a "bucking bronco" with a rolling midsection (a lawsuit waiting to happen), dark corners, and strange noises.
Ronnie rides her first pony, a good-natured little grey Shetland named Silver.
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| I include this end-of-roll shot of me leading David on Silver for my adorable pigeon-toed stance and 1950s summer outfit. |
By the end of her stay, Ronnie’s
lovely smile was almost a permanent fixture. It was a valuable experience for
me, too; we shared a bedroom and talked into the night. I learned what it was
like to live in a tough neighborhood, to be the youngest of nine kids, and a
Catholic, to have big brothers who got into fights, parents who worked too
hard, and grandparents who spoke no English and were afraid of Germans.
Ronnie
plays on our "built-in" piano. My dad took an old upright and encased
it in cupboards; its music stand/lid folded down to double as a buffet
surface in our small dining room.
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| I think this was supposed to be a Hawaiian War Dance. The "hula skirt" is cattail reeds belted over granny panties. David (with drum) is wearing a mask we got by sending in cereal boxtops. It had a miraculous Mylar mirrored panel you could see through. |
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| Ronnie's smile at full wattage; me as an 11-year-old boy; David, a rough-and-tumble little kid who grew up to be a football and track star, was surprisingly good-natured about our dressing him up. |
And thanks to Ronnie, I got to see,
through the eyes of a girl my age, how lucky and remarkable my own childhood
was.
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| At
Bushkill Park: Ronnie, David and me in front, my mother (who was quite
attractive when she wasn't making that face) and Susan in back. |
My dad made a duplicate of this
little “album” (there were originally several more photos) for her to take
home. Wherever Ronnie is these days, I hope she comes across it occasionally,
remembers, and smiles.
#####################
3.
THROWBACK THURSDAY: Marin County and San Francisco, California and All Kinds of Other Places, 1969-Present
IMAGINARY PLAYMATES AND TEENAGE ROBOTS:
THE WORLD OF ROBERT SHIELDS
Hanging out with Robert Shields in his teenage years was something like acquiring the world’s most irresistible imaginary playmate.
We first met in the late sixties, when we were both performing at the Northern California version of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire. In spite of our seven-year age difference (he was 18 years old), we quickly became buddies.
The Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1969. Robert (in black cape) and I (in striped skirt) frolic with Faire co-founder Ron Patterson. Behind Ron, in the red cape, is the marvelous performer Billy Scudder, with whom, along with Kathleen Wills, Robert was appearing.
Not long after this, Faire historians, in search of more authenticity, discovered that whiteface was not “in period” (except, presumably, for Queen Elizabeth I), and it was banned from all stages. Robert’s crowd-pleasing “robot” persona got to stay, however, because automatons (wind-up or water-powered machines acting like humans, animals, gods, etc.) dated from ancient Greece and were wildly popular during the Renaissance.
On many Fridays before Faire weekends, Robert would make his way up from Los Angeles and crash at my house, and on Saturday mornings, I was likely to be roused from slumber by him jumping on my bed, whispering excitedly: “Amie! Wake up! Wake up! It’s the Faire!!!”
With Robert (in face powder and paint) around 1970.
Between Faires (pre-email) we corresponded, his notes to me filled with enchanting drawings and collages (most were later, to my chagrin, lost in a storage mishap). I also got the Robert Shields tour of Hollywood (including his studio, which looked as if a Technicolor circus had exploded somewhere in Middle Earth), and enjoyed romping around San Francisco with him, always an adventure.
A note from Robert.
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| Robert at center. |
When, after several months, the group’s sponsor, a major soft-drink company, suddenly withdrew its funding, Robert tumbled into depression. By the time he re-emerged, he’d re-invented himself as the world’s first “mechanical mime” (And yes, he’s credited with inventing those “Robot” and “Popping” dance memes.)
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| A teenage mime with his dad and stepmother in the 1960s |
Next came a job as “Robbie the Robot” on the broad entrance sidewalk of the Hollywood Wax Museum. By mingling and interacting robotically with passers-by who could actually touch, tickle, and heckle him, Robert learned how to deal skillfully with even the rowdiest crowd behavior.
This gig led to his recruitment as a student by the übermime, Marcel Marceau himself. However, after a few months at Marceau’s school in Paris, Robert declined to become a mini-Marcel in the European tradition, and left to “pry mime loose from its artsy pedestal” (Wikipedia).
Robert (R) goofs with Marcel Marceau.
By 1971, he was living in San Francisco and looking for paying jobs. When he consulted me, I showed him a recent California Living article I’d written on successful San Francisco street performers, and suggested that he give it a shot.
And thus it happened that, after some previous scouting, one day I cajoled Robert into costume and makeup and turned him loose in historic Union Square, the only place in downtown SF that I figured would be large enough to contain the crowds attracted by his larger-than-life-and-still-growing growing talent. It was, but just barely.
To get an idea of the raw energy of those times, check out this teaser for a long-awaited film by Mark Bonn and Christine Siebert Bonn, with footage of Robert in his Union Square days, being outrageous, occasionally outside the law, and working the little-bit-of-jerkitude necessary for holding his own on the street.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWs6C6u35p0 (My Life as a Robot Trailer)
(The film had its premiere on February 29th, 2024 at the Sedona International Film Festival. It was shown in a 750-seat auditorium, but they had to put chairs in the aisles and let people stand in the back. It received a standing ovation.)
(The trailer jumps from the1970s to the 2010s because the in-between footage, mostly from TV appearances, was allowed to be used in the film, but not for promotion.)
Introducing Robert to the Square was, in retrospect, kind of like lighting the fuse of a skyrocket. As the “Union Square Mime” (and probably the first street mime in the country, though he never meant to start a trend) he became a tourist attraction, a celebrity, and an official city treasure.
Although he wore whiteface, his act—a mixture of improvisation, clowning, dance, gymnastics, parody, mimicry, and impersonation—was hardly the standard insipid mime fare that would come along after him in imitation.
Jobs poured in. He became a regular in Herb Caen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning SF Chronicle column. He opened at Winterland for the Rolling Stones. I wrote about him in California Living, then in Rolling Stone (with photos by a young Annie Liebovitz), and collaborated with photographer Robert Scheu on a book about the Shields phenomenon: Robert Shields: Mime in Our Time.
In his own time, Robert began to tour more widely, resulting in reviews and comments like the following:
“Robert Shields is the greatest mime in America.”—Marcel Marceau
“Robert Shields is a phenomenal talent.”—Mikhail Baryshnikov
“Simply superb—combining the innocence of a playful child, the world of the European clown, the agility of a gymnast, the expression of a superior actor.” —Miami Herald
“There are perhaps 35 great clowns left in the world; Robert Shields may be the best one there is.”—Red Skelton
In 1972, Robert met and married (in a giant Union-Square ceremony with half the city present) Lorene Yarnell, a spectacular dancer (and total sweetheart) with an energy, talent and zaniness to match his own. I was delighted to be in the wedding party.
Introducing Robert to the Square was, in retrospect, kind of like lighting the fuse of a skyrocket. As the “Union Square Mime” (and probably the first street mime in the country, though he never meant to start a trend) he became a tourist attraction, a celebrity, and an official city treasure.
Although he wore whiteface, his act—a mixture of improvisation, clowning, dance, gymnastics, parody, mimicry, and impersonation—was hardly the standard insipid mime fare that would come along after him in imitation.
Jobs poured in. He became a regular in Herb Caen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning SF Chronicle column. He opened at Winterland for the Rolling Stones. I wrote about him in California Living, then in Rolling Stone (with photos by a young Annie Liebovitz), and collaborated with photographer Robert Scheu on a book about the Shields phenomenon: Robert Shields: Mime in Our Time.
Rolling Stone photo by Annie Liebovitz
In 1972, I wrote the text for this book of photos by Robert Scheu.
“Robert Shields is the greatest mime in America.”—Marcel Marceau
“Robert Shields is a phenomenal talent.”—Mikhail Baryshnikov
“Simply superb—combining the innocence of a playful child, the world of the European clown, the agility of a gymnast, the expression of a superior actor.” —Miami Herald
“There are perhaps 35 great clowns left in the world; Robert Shields may be the best one there is.”—Red Skelton
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| A California Living article; photo by Richard Sharpe |
https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/239598?fbclid=IwAR12CNvZYVFokwEXF1sEf69G5gQhKsnMSijpmtWpfUiLoCxirdPv0t9EYOI (KPIX-San Francisco coverage of the Union Square wedding of Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell/October 27th, 1972/3:00)
Robert (at right, hand up) and Lorene are united in marriage by Renaissance Faire Lord Mayor Scott Beach. Robert’s brother Theodore (aka "Star") is at far right.
There I am at the right in orange, as part of the wedding party.
They became “Shields and Yarnell,” eventually hosting their own prime-time TV show on CBS, and winning an Emmy for one of their 14 TV specials. They were named Las Vegas “Entertainer(s) of the Year,” and received “Rising Star” and “Special Attractions” awards from the American Guild of Variety Artists.
Robert with George Burns
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The “Clinkers” robot personae from “The Shields & Yarnell Show.” With Red Skelton |
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| Lorene and Robert with Groucho. |
Now here’s the remarkable thing: Robert’s artwork, which has always run on a parallel track to his performing career, is every bit as jaw-dropping as his onstage persona, and just as filled with color, energy and invention.
Asked to describe his style, he comes up off-the-cuff with: “Southwest Tribal meets Old West meets Penny Arcade meets Celestial Circus meets French Garden.” He works on two levels: one-of-a-kind collectors’ items, and pieces meant to be reproduced and sold.
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| A typical Robert Deity |
Small “tribal dolls,” that utilize Robert’s mask-making skills in miniature. (From the book Cats, Fish, & Fools.)
Like his performances, his artwork encompasses ever-changing and ecumenical themes that incorporate a pantheon of deities and totems.
His muse seems to be the kind of sacred trickster who attaches rabbit ears onto goddesses, splices mermaids’ tails onto cats, mounts coyotes on horses and rabbis on motorcycles, turns robots into Kachinas, decorates carved snakes and lizards like carousel animals, and spins desert scenes into multicolored constellations.
Mermaid Cat painting
Looking at Robert’s work, one can only conclude that when he walks into his studio, it’s with the same air of joy and anticipation with which he once, early in the morning, whispered eagerly: “Wake up! Wake up! It’s the Faire!”
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| A 2020 creation |
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| Portrait of the artist |
4. THROWBACK THURSDAY, Sonoma County,
c.1990
GETTING CROTCHETY WITH RAM DASS
This drawing, which I call “Bus Stop
Deva,” was inspired by an anecdote from author, philanthropist, and beloved
spiritual teacher Ram Dass (once Harvard University Professor of Psychology
Richard Alpert). This is how it came about:
As I headed toward my seventies, I
started thinking seriously about honing some useful old-lady skills.
I’d always liked the idea of taking,
essentially, a bunch of string and turning it into something useful. Knitting,
however, bored me silly, and I went through my sewing and embroidery phases at
exhaustive and exhausting length in my younger days. Quilting? Too scattered
and space-consuming for me. Tatting? I don’t think so.
Then I heard this story from Ram
Dass:
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| Ram Dass |
“When I was younger and more full of
myself, I was giving a talk to a roomful of theology students, demonstrating
how much I knew about comparative religion. Midway through my talk, I noticed
an elderly woman sitting in the front row, beaming and smiling, and nodding
every time I made what I considered a particularly cogent point.
“After the lecture, when I had come
down to the floor for informal questions and conversation, I noticed her still
sitting there, still smiling. I made my way over to her and said. ‘Hello. You
looked like you were enjoying the lecture.’
“’Oh, yes,” she replied; “you put
these things so well, dear.’
“’Well, thank you,’ I said, ‘You
know, I was touching on some fairly esoteric topics; did you have any problem
following them?’
“’Oh no, dear,’ was her answer, ‘You
see, I crochet.’”
This, I decided, was something to
explore. After a number of fits and starts, I learned to crochet some simple,
yet satisfying items. I am not yet, however, in possession of the dear lady’s
esoteric knowledge, though I think I’m beginning to follow the thread of it.
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This
hat was a study in recycling. At a yard sale years ago I found a long
scarf with an Italian label, but made of yarn spun from scraps left over
from a sari manufacturer in India. It was about one hat too long,
however, so I shortened it and made this beanie. The unusual tassel
ornament is an earring found on the back seat of a bus.
###################
5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Easton, Pennsylvania, c. 1955 TUTU BLUES: MY LIFE AS A BALLERINA (NOT) When I was young, we often attended movies at the State Theater in Easton, PA. A premier vaudeville venue built in the 1890s, the State had fallen on somewhat hard times, but its interior still manifested some of the faux-Moorish-palace glamor of its past. 
The rundown State Theater in the 1950s.
Featured in several of its glass-fronted lobby showcases were photos advertising the building’s third-floor tenants, the Louis Nardi School of Dance, with perky star students posed in adorable/improbable costumes, dimpling in Bo-Peep bonnets or Highland-flinging in tiny kilts. 
Not me.
Equally improbably, when I was 12 years old, I conceived a sudden burning desire to join the ranks of those little girls, and convinced my parents to let me take tap lessons. Founded in 1934, the Nardi School was a Chorus Line-like classic—dim, echoing and drafty, carved out of the former vaudeville theater's dressing rooms and rehearsal halls. Beginning tap was taught by Louis Nardi himself, a dapper little man with shoe-polish hair who had apparently had some kind of dance career, though certainly not in ballet (anyone in toe shoes would have towered over him by about a foot).  I was put into a class that should really have been called “Girls Too Old To Start Ballet Lessons.” The young woman teaching it must have sighed when she saw me coming—not only too old, but wrong body type (I was built more like Gene Kelly than Margot Fonteyn), and muscles in all the wrong places from shoveling out horse stalls and heaving around wheelbarrow-loads of poop. I adored the lessons, however, and enjoyed sharing them with Delana Kay Bish (now Delana Bish Delameter), who became my best friend. Eventually recital time rolled around, and all students, whatever their level of proficiency, were expected to perform. Our class was to appear in two numbers; one was a saccharine waltz to the tune of that raging 1920s hit, “In My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown.” (“Alice Blue” was a color popularized by Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter.) I have practically no memory of the other dance, except that it involved a lot of posing, arm-waving, and tripping (sometimes literally) around in circles.  Goofing under the willows with Delana in our recital tutus. I had no business wearing toe shoes, as evidenced by my lack of proper form, and never did learn to dance "en pointe." The elaborate recital costumes deemed necessary for these exhibitions were not provided by the school, but were assigned to our theoretically doting mothers. Although my mother sewed well (mostly to provide nice dresses for my sister and me in the postwar years), she was not exactly thrilled when requested to produce two outfits, actually a blue-satin-and-sequins bathing suit-like getup with interchangeable skirts. One of these was a simple tea-length affair composed of blue net gathered onto a waistband. Easy-peasy. The other, however, was a combined tutu-with-panty composed of fifteen layers of graduated net ruffles. This was a serious tutu, a Swan Lake-worthy garment, and total overkill for my clunky five minutes of arm-waving, but my mother, bless her, made it without complaint. Shortly after this, it was determined that I should switch to ballet lessons at the Easton YWCA, taught by a no-nonsense former ballerina in a modern well-lighted studio. There I got a solid grounding in technique, and almost gratefully gave up my ballerina aspirations for my true forte—character roles in productions like Peter and the Wolf, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 
As May Queen at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, c. 1970.
Dance became an integral part of my life; I went on to perform and choreograph in modern dance companies, musical theater companies, and the original Renaissance and Dickens Fair(e)s. I learned English and Scottish country dancing, Greek and Balkan line dancing, ballroom dancing, even belly dancing.  Time passed. The Louis Nardi School of Dance and Performing Arts, now in its own facility, is still very much a vigorous and going concern, making it one of the oldest continuously run performing-arts schools in the US. The State Theater, which underwent a massive restoration to its former glory in the 1970s, was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, and now hosts major shows and performances. 
The restored State Theater
Delana Bish and I were friends all through high school, lost touch, and reconnected on Facebook several years ago. And my tutu? Well, years ago, when I was in my forties and visiting my parents, I opened an old dress box in a window-seat, and there it was, still blue and pristine. “That thing was just so hard to make, and I spent so much time on it, I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it,” admitted my mother. It had been a true labor of love, and I hugged her and thanked her again, this time with tears in my eyes. I believe she finally wound up keeping it in the family by giving it, in the late 1990s, to my niece Morgan, who has her own marvelous way with fashion and terpsichore. 
Morgan at left; two bunny outfits of her own design.
########################
6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco,
California, and Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1970s
WHAT A QUEER BIRD THE FROG ARE
Since I grew up in close proximity to a pond
and a marsh, one of my earliest memories is of the various noises of frogs in
summertime. I watched them, tried to catch them, swam with the polliwogs, and
went to sleep to the sound of their nighttime vocalizations.
Years later, when I was learning calligraphy
in the early 1970s, I produced the rendering below, in modified Gothic-style
lettering, of a silly song we used to sing in school to the hymn tune of
“Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.”
Then, in 1975, when I was traveling the
country with the circus/vaudeville troupe Dr. California’s Golden Gate Remedy,
we performed (for contrast in between acts of juggling, fire-eating,
tightrope-walking, knockabout comedy and other foolery) several vocal numbers.
We had, among others, a Noël Coward song ("Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington"), an
Appalachian shape-note hymn ("How Long, Oh, How Long"), an Andrews Sisters ditty ("Cinnamon Toast"), a country-swing tune ("Sioux City Sue") ,
and a much more complex polyphonic-round variation of the frog song
(traditional; author unknown), with slightly different words:
What a queer bird, the frog are
When he sit he stand (almost) When he walk he fly (almost) When he talk he cry (almost) He ain't got no sense (hardly) He ain't got no tail, (hardly) (either) He sit on what he ain't got almost
If you’re really curious, this is what it sounds
like:
One of our performances was on the occasion
of a very large reunion of my mother’s side of the family at the scene of my
early rana pipiens encounters. I’m not exactly sure that it’s the frog song
we’re singing in this photo, but as we were only about 50 feet from the pond,
it would have been entirely appropriate.
Left to right: Jeffrey Briar, Sandey Grinn, Elisabeth Main, Hilary Carlip, Doug Whitney, me, Ruth Barrett, William Quinn Barrett, Marque Siebenthal, Amanda Peletz, Nate Stein.
###################
7. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Interlocken Center for Experiential Education, Summer After Summer THEATER MAGIC IN THE WOODs: How'd They DO That?
When I was an administrator/teacher at the
Interlocken International Summer Camp (ISC), I was constantly amazed at the
variety of its class and program offerings.
ISC Program Planning Sheet
The
cast and audience for one of the ISC's earliest plays, A Midsummer
Night's Dream, treks through the woods to the Red Pine Forest.
There was also a heady atmosphere of history, myth and folklore that produced ongoing adventures like the unforgettable “Quest for the Druid Crown” (masterminded by New Hampshire State Storyteller John "Odds" Bodkin and others). This was a meticulously crafted summer-long adventure that was so realistic and convincing that a number of participants were stunned at the end of the summer when it was revealed as fiction. Or “The Lore of the Gore,” instigated by Peter Jackson Herman, an ongoing historical/fantastical saga of the land occupied by Interlocken, known in the 18th century as “Campbell’s Gore.” 
From an early play in the 1970s
Although there were many outstanding perpetrators of theatrical moments at the ISC, in my time there it was always with the arrival of professional British theater directors Roy and Maggie Nevitt in early August, that the camp's everyday magic began to unfold brilliantly into the Theater Festival. 
Roy and Maggie Nevitt in recent times with daughter Lucy, a long-time Interlocken student.
Me on the left, with Maggie and Roy, c. 1985
Preparations for the Festival, which was held
each year on visiting day, would begin gradually, almost casually, with classes
in performance, prop-making, costuming, play-writing, song, dance, and other
theatrical pursuits gently integrated into the class schedule.
The main deck of the camp turned into a sailing ship in 1978. Folksingers John Roberts and Tony Barrand are under the sail, in blue shirts, singing sea songs and shanties. Note risqué figurehead on right.
Student actors turn the capstan to the tune of a work shanty sung by John Roberts.
Maggie Nevitt, meanwhile, acted as coordinator and supervisor of costuming, prop-making, and keeping the physical/personnel aspects of the Festival together. An irresistible deadpan jokester named Mike Stasiuk would also show up to work with kids to create marvelous giant puppets and props. 
Roy Nevitt inspects a giant talking head ("Mr. Talker") built by Mike Stasiuk on the camp's climbing wall.
 
Littlest Hobbit warriors menaced by Nazgul in Lord of the Rings.
A select (supervised) group always got deeply involved in pyrotechnics, whether producing flaming comets (oil-soaked toilet-paper rolls flying down wires), incinerating Adolf Hitler, or constructing full-on fireworks displays. 
Props,
puppets and pyrotechnics: a scene from Listen To the Voices, depicting the takeover of Indian lands by railroads and white settlers.
This was, by the way, not your wimpy
children’s-theater pap; performances over the years included: Black Elk
Speaks; Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage; Voltaire's Candide;
Homer’s Odyssey; the Hindu Mahabharata; Lord of the Rings; The Mists of
Avalon; Gulliver’s Travels; the Chinese Legend of the Monkey King; and, I
kid you not, The Old Testament.
Just your ordinary little summer camp play; a scene from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1978.
Original themes included Listen to the Voices, a Native American history (real Indians, not Wa-Wa-Tonkas); and a performance based on the history of the Shakers, adapted by students from interviews with Shaker Eldresses and performed at the Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH.  
Dancers in The Mists of Avalon, 1985.
From a series of 1997 interviews with staff members: “I’ve been associated with many schools, and I’ve never seen kids act the way they do for Roy Nevitt in the Festivals here. Never. It’s a mystery to me what makes it work, and why no other drama teachers I’ve seen have ever figured out how to get that level of performance from kids”—T. William Smith 
Argus-eyed vessel in The Odyssey.
“It’s so wonderful to watch kids create something that you can see comes right from who they are”— Odds Bodkin “What I remember most about the Festivals is the transformation of children. There’d be these ‘difficult’ kids, or these quiet little uncomfortable kids, and you’d put them in that Festival setting and they’d just bloom."—Billie McGuire Novak  Hollywood voice actor Bill Ratner directs The Odyssey
By the time of the actual Festival
performance, the air of wizardry had often become so pronounced that it seemed
almost normal, especially to the younger kids. One of my favorite memories is of a Full Moon Ceremony held down by the lake on an unexpectedly cloudy night, featuring a battle between figures representing Good and Evil, with Evil, vanquished, diving into the water through a flaming hoop, and fire and smoke and explosions and rockets whistling everywhere, and tremendous noise and shouting. And just after the last bang, there was a stunned silence, and the clouds parted, and an enormous full moon sailed into view, right on cue. Everybody gasped and oohed and aahed, and I heard one little boy behind me ask, in all seriousness: ”OK, How’d they do that?” Just a little Interlocken magic. **************************************** https://www.google.com/search…: https://communitytheatreplaywright.wordpress.com/…/an-inte…/
##################
8. THROWBACK THURSDAY, San Andreas Fault, May, 1974 A COSMIC GIGGLE ON THE FAULT LINE  Here are five friends sunning themselves on the porch of a rustic cabin belonging to neon artist Brian Coleman, the fellow on the left. The structure was located so close to the San Andreas Fault that you could look across to the next ridge and see the tree-gap and the slump and notch of rock displaced by perpetual tectonic creep. The sight and feel of it was both uncanny and atavistic, like a forbidden glimpse of earth-deities mating, or spotting the Great God Pan lurking in the redwoods. “Doesn’t it make you nervous?” I asked Brian, whose art certainly displays an uncanny energy. “Naw,” he replied, “I figure when the Big One hits, I’ll just grab a redwood and hang on for dear life. Those suckers always make it through.” Sounds like a plan. 
Neon art by Brian
So why am I the only one in the photo giggling? Do I have some sort of special receptors for Fault energy? No, it was simply a matter of timing, as innocent-puss Roger Steffens (to my right, in blue shirt), perhaps inspired by TGGPan, had just launched a tickle attack on my bare midriff a second or so before the shutter snapped. Not my fault.
#######################
9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Oberwinter/Bad Godesberg/Bonn, Germany; 1961-62
THREE BARRELS OF SAUERKRAUT AND AN
ALLIGATOR: OUT OF MY DEPTH IN DEUTCHLAND
When I was selected as my high
school’s first American Field Service foreign exchange student, I had no idea
what I was getting into. To begin with, having taken three years of French and
achieved reasonable fluency, I was sent to Germany, with its (to me) almost
totally unfamiliar and impenetrable language.
Newspaper photo of me dutifully studying German, pre-trip.
Then, after a stormy voyage across
the Atlantic with 36 other Germany-bound students, and several weeks of field
trips and intensive language study at a youth hostel, I found myself living
with the aristocratic family of Wolfgang von Dorrer, who was then Germany’s
Minister of Inland Transportation.
A festive dinner with fellow students aboard the Holland-America Lines' M.S. Seven Seas.
I had been taught nice table
manners, and could carry on polite conversation with adults, but basically I
was a naïve country kid who had grown up running wild in the woods, attending
one-room schools with outhouses, and shoveling horse manure.
The only kind of instruction in
German manners we’d learned at the orientation was along the lines of shaking
hands with anybody we met; refraining from exclaiming “Gack!” when served head
cheese or blood sausage; and not giggling whenever we saw a shop front emblazoned
with “SHMUCK” (German for jewelry). Add the language barrier, and I was hardly
equipped for life among the country’s aristocratic and governing classes.
L
to R: Some Von Dorrers: Irene, Renate, Papa Wolfgang, Eva, a family friend,
and Mama Dorothea, on the terrace overlooking the Rhine and the
Siebengeberge.
The family consisted of Papa
Wolfgang, his wife Dorothea, and their four stair-step daughters: Eva, Marleis,
Irene, and the "baby," Renate, who was my age and the only one still living at home. Their
house, while not quite a mansion, was large and imposing enough, perched in a
lovely location above the tiny village of Oberwinter-am-Rhein, easy commuting
distance from government offices in Bonn.
I could look out my bedroom window
across the Rhine River to the fabled Siebengeberge (Seven Hills), most of their
summits crowned with castles or ruins, the source of stories like Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs and the legend of Siegfried and the Dragon. We were just
across the river from the area's most famous castle, the Drachenfels (Dragon’s
Crag), a looming 12th-century ruin.
Out of my bedroom window: three of the Seven Hills, the Petersberg, Dreachenberg and Drachenfels.
Meals in the Von Dorrer household
were distinctly formal affairs, even breakfast—no slouching in one’s jammies
over cornflakes—and served by a maid. I was introduced to the ritual of which
utensils for what course; wine served with meals; the polite necessity of
keeping one’s hands in sight at all times (a holdover from days when it was
necessary to prove one wasn’t reaching for a weapon); the etiquette of cloth
napkins kept in rings and used for a week between launderings (I privately
thought this was gross, being used to paper throwaways); and topics never to be
mentioned at the table.
These included WWII, the atrocities
of which, at that point, had ended a mere 16 years before. The Von Dorrers had
spent the war years with relatives in Switzerland, but had returned to the
aftermath.
The early 1960s were very much years
of transition from the “old Germany” to the new. For instance, when introduced
to adults visiting the Von Dorrer household, Renate and I were expected to make
a “knicks” (a small curtsy), it was hard to do this with a straight face, and
unheard of in less aristocratic circles.
A school party (no quadrilles). The young gentleman behind me in the top photo is Alex Capron
another member of my AFS group and now a Professor of Law at USC. He's
at top left, next to Renate Von Dorrer, in the bottom photo. I'm at
bottom right, the chubbiest I've ever been in my life from all those
meals. (The photos, like several others here, are discolored from damp
storage.)
And although a popular form of
entertainment among our set was an afternoon dressed to the nines, sipping tea
and dancing (I kid you not) quadrilles, Renate was known to sneak out at night
to attend “cellar parties,” bopping to music played by a student group calling
themselves, without irony, “The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Jazz Band.” (The one time I
joined her, we got caught; Papa Wolfgang was NOT amused, and I was sure I was
going to be sent home.)
Renate and I attended the Nicolas
Cusanus Gymnasium, a school for the children of foreign diplomats and children
of German government employees, located in Bad Godesberg, another castle town
next to Bonn.
Although classes were taught “auf Deutch,” there was a special course of
“German for Foreigners,” a great air of leniency, and always someone with whom
to speak French or English in a pinch. The friends I made came from a rainbow
of nations.
With
school friends Doug, Suzy and Luddy in front of the Nicolas Cusanus
Gymnasium. Those white boots were all the rage in Germany that year.
Although I had a headache for the
first six weeks from trying to comprehend the German spoken around me,
something finally clicked and I fairly soon was able to chatter in fluent
(though no doubt ungrammatical) Deutsch.
I got used to not shaving my legs or
armpits (“What for?” asked Renate), and the fact that German kids seemed to
bathe much less frequently than I was used to. I explored the castles of the
Siebengeberge; I learned the Viennese waltz from diplomats at the Embassy Club
in Bonn; and rude songs from the local boys in my classes, who seemed to revert
to the antics of fifth-graders if a teacher left the room.
The Godesberg Castle in Bad (spa) Godesberg. One can lunch among the ruins in a very nice restaurant.
I acquired a nickname, “Mäuschen,”
from my habit of drawing little cartoon mice, and became almost chubby on the
common regimen of five meals a day (breakfast, late morning snack break at
school, main meal around 1:00 PM, late-afternoon tea with pastries and
sandwiches, and a light supper around 7:00).
The Von Dorrers, all of whom spoke
English, but mostly insisted on German, were remarkably tolerant as I averaged
several social blunders and/or language fails each day (for example, mistakenly
addressing a distinguished guest with the familiar form of “you” generally used
for close friends and family, small children and pets). I even overheard some
of these goofs being recounted to other adults as examples of how “cute” I was.
I didn’t, however, hold a monopoly
on cuteness. One afternoon, I was carrying a pile of freshly dried laundry down
the upstairs hall when I encountered Papa Wolfgang on one of his rare days of
leisure. As we greeted each other, a piece of clothing fell off of the top of
my pile and landed on his shoe. Gentleman that he was, he picked it up.
This was in the days when, if you
weren't naturally endowed with a generous bustline, you were expected to
manufacture one. I, with my boyish figure, tended toward lacy padded push-up
bras. I don’t know which of us was more embarrassed at the sight of one of
these dangling from his hand.
Since all of the Von Dorrer women
were amply endowed, it was probably the first time Papa W. had encountered such
a garment. His diplomatic training, however, was equal to the occasion.
Placing the bra back on top of the
pile with a graceful little bow, he remarked kindly: “My dear, I see you are
like Venus—risen from the foam.”
Although blushing furiously, I had
to smile.
When I returned home, I was
enveloped in an odd sort of celebrity. I had written letters home to my family
in the form of a daily journal, which, I discovered, my dad’s secretary had
dutifully typed out and reproduced to be passed hand to hand.
The 12th-century Drachenfels; a more "modern" castle and guest house can be seen at right.
I not only learned that there had
been an entire audience waiting for the latest installment of my adventures,
but that my journey had been sponsored in part, by selling “shares” in me for
60¢ apiece.
AFS students going home on the S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam. I'm at front center, in hooded dark coat and knee-socks.
I also discovered that I was
expected to give talks on my experience to local service clubs, school
assemblies and other groups. If I had had any fear of public speaking, I soon
got over it out of sheer necessity.
I
took this photo of a guard at the Iron Curtain on a student trip to the
Roman-built city of Trier. The "curtain" at that point was the heavy
barbed-wire fencing that can be seen stretching off to the horizon, with
the ground plowed on either side of it (to show footprints), and a
watchtower every mile or so.
We found a tangle of barbed wire discarded from recent repairs to the fence, and asked the guard if we could break off pieces of it for souvenirs. He gave his assent, and as he turned away, muttered "I wish you'd take the whole damn fence." I think someone in my family may still have the framed piece of wire.
Oh, and the sauerkraut/alligator
thing? My poker-faced reply to the many folks who inquired, seriously or in
jest: “What did they exchange you for?”
###################
10. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Kemmerertown, Pennsylvania, c. 1870
THE KEMMERERS GET THEIR PICTURE MADE
OK, it’s somewhere around 1870; the
Civil War has been over for a few years, and the art and science of
photography, refined on the battlefield, is everywhere. Everybody who’s anybody
is getting a family portrait made, and the Kemmerer Family of Kemmerertown,
Pennsylvania, is no exception.
There they are: my maternal
great-great grandparents, Joseph Kemmerer Jr. (1826-1879) and Mary Ann
Mansfield Kemmerer (1825-1880), posing with their 12 children.
Far Left:
Joseph III; Back
row: Mary Ann, Peter, Ida Salora, Jerome,
Anna Lucinda, Charles. Front row:
Jacob, Catherine, parents Joseph and Mary Ann, John, Ella Sophia
Joseph Jr. (in front row left of
center), the very picture of a successful bourgeois, wears an expression that
seems to say: “I’m wealthy enough to dress my kids in the latest (matching)
fashions; what’s your superpower?”
Mary Ann, to the right of him, seems both resigned and oddly youthful to have produced all these strapping children; she was only about 45 at the time of the photo, and her husband about the same age.
Although Joseph Jr. was a prosperous
farmer, he came from a family known for financial wizardry. The name “Kemmerer”
derives from the German “Kammer Herr,” literally “Master of the Chamber” or
“treasurer,” and the number of men with that surname who subsequently made
their name in banking and finance in the US is surprising.
These include Edwin W. Kemmerer
(1875-1945), possibly a distant cousin, who helped design the US Federal
Reserve system and served as economic advisor to over a dozen foreign
governments.
G-G-Grandad Joseph was himself the
great-great grandson of Johannes Nicholas Kemmerer, the eldest of three
moneywise brothers who emigrated to the American Colonies from Germany’s Upper
Rhine Valley in 1730.
Meanwhile, almost a century and a
half later, the younger Kemmerers, including my great-grandmother Ella Sophia
(at far right, still in little-girl short dresses), stare cooly at the camera
with a definite air of entitlement. (Well, except for Peter, second from the
left in the second row, who was “difficult” and never married.)
One thing is certain: Joseph, Mary
Ann, Peter, Ida Salora, Jerome, Anna Lucinda, Charles, Jacob, Catherine, John,
and little Ella Sophia certainly knew where their next meal was coming from.
(Thanks to fellow Kemmerer
descendant Robert Ralph Arnts for the historical
information.)
##################
11. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, CA,
1967
HANGIN’ WITH THE DEAD; A SHORT STRANGE TRIP 
Toward the end of the summer of 1967, I arrived
in San Francisco from the east coast to become a graduate assistant and M.A.
candidate in San Francisco State University’s then-renowned English/Creative
Writing department.
Although it was “The Summer of Love,” and I had wound up, purely by accident, living in the Haight-Ashbury, all I knew about the so-called "hippie phenomenon" and the San Francisco music scene was what I’d read in magazines like TIME and LIFE, and seen on TV. I did walk the three blocks downhill from my new house to get a look at the ongoing Haight Street carnival, but it was just too much culture shock at that point, so I concentrated on finding my feet at SF State. One Saturday afternoon I had just woken up groggy and disoriented, following a three-day-and-night orgy of reading and grading papers, when a new friend, an artist whose professional name is still “Futzie Nutzle” (two of his works can now be found in the NYC Museum of Modern Art), showed up with an invitation: “A guy I went to high school with has a band, and they’re having some people over. C’mon, you need to get out of here.” 
I believe this is my very own 1967-era Futzie Nutzle.
We went to a place in the upper Haight, which seemed to be full of herbal smoke and people who looked an awful lot like the denizens of Haight Street. After a few introductions, Futzie disappeared into the crowd, and I, spotting a vacant spot in a corner, went over, stretched out, and promptly went back to sleep. I woke up with one of the band members (henceforth to be known as “X”) bending over me and saying: “Who are you?” I sat up, yawned; we looked at each other, liked what we saw, and fell into conversation. Nice guy. “So what’s your band called?” I asked. A pause. “Um, the Grateful Dead.” Oh, them.  Futzie and I left soon afterwards, but the next day, having somehow obtained my phone number, X called and invited me to go with him and a bandmate to visit the latter’s parents, who, in spite of being quite conservatively upper-crust, seemed to have no problem with their son’s hippie looks and friends. During the rest of that week, X and I did some usual date-like activities—dinner, movies, motorcycle rides along the Coast Highway— and I met more of the band and crew. The next Saturday night, however, I found myself backstage at the Avalon Ballroom, feeling very much like Dorothy in Oz in the midst of the full-on Dead scene—rockers, groupies, incipient Deadheads, dopers, groovers, trippers, light shows, very loud music, and, for all I knew, flying monkeys. At that point, I had very short hair, and looked definitely East Coast. From the stares I was getting, I might as well have been wearing Dorothy’s gingham jumper and ankle socks. That was the beginning of a strange attempt to blend academia with psychedelia. It helped that X, along with two of his five bandmates (they’d recently added a second drummer to the original quintet), had moved from the original “Dead House” on Ashbury St. to a rental in a quiet Upper Haight neighborhood. The conversations over dinner in the new place were predictably full of music, but also laced with discussions of books, ideas, and arcane philosophies. 
The infamous Dead House at 710 Ashbury St.
All of the band members were polite (well, except for Pigpen) and friendly in a distant kind of way; they’d seen many young women come and go, and I occupied an odd space considerably north of “groupie” but well south of “old lady.” I did overhear one of the guys refer to me as “X’s straight chick.” 
A bootleg Grateful Dead refrigerator magnet, marketed after the band had split up.
While I enjoyed attending Dead activities, each a glimpse into a strange and wonderful culture, I finally had to face the fact that my academic work was beginning to suffer, and that X and I had reached somewhat of an impasse: while I needed an orderly routine of sleeping, eating and studying, he needed someone who was free to hang out until the wee hours, and willing to drop everything to do so. The matter was resolved with a tour in the immediate offing (not a long one; the stadiums full of adoring fans would come later), and the question: do I buckle down to work on my M.A. in earnest or run off with the Raggle-Taggle Gypsies-O? When I chose the former, I think both X and I were a bit relieved. No blame, few regrets; subsequent encounters in later years were cordial.  The whole Dead experience, in addition to broadening my existential horizons considerably, had two major effects on my personal style: I learned the joys of wearing long flowing garments, and of fashioning them with cheap but sturdy and beautiful Indian bedspread fabrics. And I let my hair grow long. 
Before and after: the top photo was taken a few weeks before I left for San Francisco. Bottom photo by Roger Steffens.
I could have taken offense on a number of levels, but, hey, grooming tips from the Grateful Dead? Priceless.
##################
12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s
Hill, Pennsylvania, 1940s
BöSE GEISTER Or, MOMMY, WHY IS OUR CHURCH BLUE?
When I was a wee tot, if you had
asked me what kind of church I attended, I would have replied confidently:
“Blue.”
The Blue Church was a central
feature of my early years, not only for its unusual color, but because it was
one of the few amenities close to our country farmhouse, so close, in fact,
that it even featured in our postal address.
Yep, it's blue.
My sister Susan and I attended
Sunday-school and social events there, waited for the school bus in its covered
porch, and played in its modest grounds with the same neighborhood kids with
whom we went to school. Everyone used it as a reference point when giving
directions. You couldn’t miss it; it was just so—blue.
It wasn’t until around 2005, when
Susan sent me a photo of its cornerstone (which reads “Christ United
Evangelical Church 1871”) that I had any idea of what denomination or beliefs
the Blue Church espoused.
If it was evangelical, it was, at
least in the late 1940s, a quietly Protestant and well-mannered form of the
genre, with no shouting, bearing witness or testifying that I ever saw, nothing
to raise my parents’ eyebrows (my mother was Methodist, my dad, Baptist; the
Blue Church was within walking distance).
In Sunday-school, we learned the
usual Bible stories, sang about Climbing Jacob’s Ladder and about how Jesus
Wanted us For a Sunbeam, and (somewhat confusingly) about the Itsy-Bitsy
Spider—it was years before I discovered that this hapless but persistent
arachnid appeared nowhere in the Bible.
Shortly after Susan and I
participated in the fun and excitement of a “Tom Thumb Wedding” at the Blue
Church in 1950, my parents decided to start making the 15-minute
drive to downtown Easton on Sundays, and, just like that, we were Presbyterians
(my mother and dad for life).
 (See a larger photo and more about this event in #16 below.)
It wasn’t until recently, however, that I
started wondering how this odd little church came to be, so I Googled and
called around. It appears to have been founded by a clutch of escapees from
another Morgan’s Hill landmark anomaly, “The Two Churches.”
The Two Churches: St. John's Church (main photo) and St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church (inset) across the street.
Several miles up the road from the
Blue Church, two imposing hilltop structures—St. John’s Church (founded in
1756) and St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (1848) face each other on
opposite sides of the road like competing gas stations, solid bricks-and-mortar
testaments to how seriously folks took their doctrinal differences in bygone
times. The original Blue Churchers appear to be a group united in their
weariness with the feud mentality.
Easter
morning at the Blue Church, probably 1948. I'm on the left in the 2nd
row, partially obscured by Buddy Fox's head. Susan is in the top row, in
dark coat, looking down. The Sunday-school teacher, Berna Seifert
(top), was an institution at the Blue Church; she's now honored with a
bronze plaque on its exterior.
And the color? When I was 10 or 11,
I got curious; “Why is the church blue?” I asked. My mother thought it was
because it was a peaceful color. My dad said maybe it was supposed to represent
the sky and heaven. Somebody else told me it was because they got a deal on a
bunch of blue bricks.
I got the real answer from Mabel
Helm, an elderly lady of Pennsylvania German extraction who lived across a lane
from the building. When I asked her, she muttered something that sounded like
“burzageister.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Böse Geister,” she repeated, “Bad
spirits. Blue keeps ‘em away.”
“Does it really? I asked.
A glance across the lane: “So far,”
she replied.
######################
13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Easton,
Pennsylvania, 1958-1960s; Hollywood, California, 1981-Present
THE MOST SURPRISING ADVENTURES
OF LITTLE JACK
I first encountered Jack
Coleman in 1958, when his very pregnant mother subbed for my vacationing
Sunday-school teacher. At that point, he was generally referred to as: “Good
Lord, Aggie! another one? How many is
that? Seven?”
As a family, the Colemans
were not only numerous, but a patrician force to be reckoned with: direct
descendants of Benjamin Franklin, with a Pulitzer-Prize-winning grandfather.
Beautiful and brilliant.
There was eminent historian and distinguished Lafayette College professor Dr. John MacDonald Coleman; his aristocratic Katherine Hepburn-like mover-and-shaker wife Agnes; and their seven children, four girls and three boys—each more beautiful and brilliant than the next—with whom I attended Sunday-school classes, ballet classes, birthday parties, etc.
Around 1962, I was talked
into being an assistant teacher in the little-kid version of Vacation Bible
School, a kind of churchly daycare for three-to-five year-olds. My role consisted
primarily of reading sanitized Bible stories, making dioramas, and keeping the adorable
tykes from pelting each other with Play-doh™. One of those kids was the
youngest Coleman, little Jack.
An aspiring young actor's composite sheet.
Tow-headed, button-cute and
whip-smart, Jack actually listened to the stories, asked penetrating and precocious
questions, and especially relished those incidents involving miraculous
transformations (wine into water, burning bushes, raising the dead) and
adventures/heroics (David and Goliath, Joshua at Jericho, The Flight from
Egypt).
After that summer, I went
away to college and other lives, and seldom watched TV, missing entire small-screen
eras—roughly from The Brady Bunch
through The Sopranos.
On one visit home, I overheard
hear my mother’s friends discussing the fact that little Jack had gone into
acting and was on television. There was an odd tone to their remarks, later
explained when I learned that, from 1982-88, he played Steven Carrington, one
of TV’s very first openly gay characters, on Dynasty.
Jack as Steven Carrington
Then, around 2008, while briefly
sidelined at home with Netflix Streaming, I discovered entire seasons of cultish
must-watch shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, Lost, and a quirky and innovative comic-book spinoff called Heroes,
about ordinary people who became possessed of superpowers.
As I watched, I realized that
one of the actors, a good-looking fellow whose performance walked a brilliant
and subtle line between sympathetic and downright evil, seemed oddly familiar.
When I saw the name in the
credits, I realized that the person whose face, voice and expressions I was
remembering (though not the evil aspect) was Dr. John Coleman (1918-1998), who,
like this protean character, Noah Bennett, was graceful, brilliant, charmingly
off-center and wore somewhat geeky glasses.
Good Lord! (I realized) It
was Little Jack, channeling aspects of his dad into his TV role. (His acting
genes actually came from both parents, who frequently took leading parts in
faculty plays at Lafayette College.)
Two John Colemans: father and son. Jack's Heroes character, Noah Bennett. is known as "HRG," which stands for "horn-rimmed-glasses." He's not actually wearing horn-rimmed-glasses, but his dad is.
Heroes continued for four
seasons (2006-2010), and a mini-series, Heroes Reborn, aired in 2015. Beginning
with his 1981 debut in Days of Our Lives, Jack Coleman has gone on to become
one of the most quietly successful and hardest-working actors in the business.
Baby-kissing in The Office.
About to get bit in The Vampire Diaries.
He has appeared in or starred
in over 80 TV shows and movies, including Touched
By An Angel, Diagnosis Murder, House MD, Nip/Tuck, Entourage, CSI, Criminal
Minds, Chicago PD, Without a Trace, Nightmare Café, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Mentalist, Rock the House, Castle, Vampire Diaries, and many more.
Heroics: check.
Adventures: check.
Miraculous transformations:
check.
I like to think that little
Jack is in his element.
#######################
14. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan's Hill, Pennsylvania, 1940s-70s, California, Present Day
THE TALE OF SARAPANDY
Or NOT YOUR AVERAGE BEAR 
It was never quite clear whose bear
he was, although I can remember him being fairly new when I was quite small. He
was not a child-friendly bear—in those post-WWII days, it was almost as if
people had forgotten how to make toys. He was hard and blocky, with visible
stitching and pseudo-plush black-and-white fur that quickly became dingy and
matted.
His eyes were the creepy plastic
googly kind, so haphazardly glued to his face that they soon fell (or were
plucked) off and could have been swallowed had I not had it drummed into my
little head that I was never to put strange objects into my mouth.
His nose was even worse, a blob of
black molded proto-plastic affixed to his face with an inch-long metal spike
thrust through a vaguely tongue-shaped piece of red felt that looked like it
protruded from his nostrils instead of his rudimentary black-thread mouth. I
enjoyed pulling the nose off and replacing it until someone noticed the spike
and confiscated it.
Although soon eyeless, noseless,
tongueless, faceless, the bear at least had a name. When he was new, someone
had dandled him in front of me and said: “Look! There’s your panda!”
“Sarapandy,” I echoed, and the name stuck.
Sarapandy and I had few, if any,
Velveteen-Rabbit moments. In our family, Binkies, Blankies, Loveys, Wubbies,
and other adjuncts to thumbsucking were discouraged, as was the act itself, for
fear of pinworms and dental deformities. If I took anything to bed with me, it
was books, since I had somehow developed a fear that if I slept with a doll or
stuffed toy, I might roll over and smother it.
Thus, any attachment I had to
Sarapandy was rather tenuous, and he soon joined the collection of odd bodies
in the toybox—a Howdy Doody doll, a large Dopey-the-Dwarf figure from the first
Walt Disney Snow White, several naked baby dolls, a rubber rabbit that
squeaked, a Raggedy Andy, and an odd blonde nappy-headed stuffed creature that
we called “Dolly-Gun”—it was made by a now-famous German toy company, and its
label said “Dolli-Gund.”
 Me in my mother's arms. clutching Dopey and my sister's doll, Mary Ann while reacting to being petted by my Grandmother Hill, who lived in Arkansas. This was one of the two times Grandmother Hill and I ever met.
These were all mixed in with toy
cars, stringless yo-yos, broken crayons and other childhood detritus. All of
the humanoid elements of the scrum were pulled out from time to time to serve
as actors or supernumeraries in dramatic productions, during which they might
be plied with beverages, cross-dressed, caused to fight one another to the
death, or used as missiles against invaders.
As my sister and brother and I grew
up, the collection of toys naturally dwindled, until the only visible remnants,
kept by my mother, were my brother’s battered, dirty and earless pink-and-white
stuffed rabbit (known as “Musical” because he had a music box inside him and
had come with a sash that read “I Am Musical”); and, yes, Sarapandy.
The
toybox (made around 1941 by my dad out of pieces of a 17" wide
cherrywood plank he'd scrounged from somewhere) now enjoys a serene
second life as a costume box in my front room in Sebastopol. It still
has its original hardware.
Someone, as years passed, had taken
pity on the poor bear’s eyeless state and sewed a red button and a blue one in
vaguely eye-like positions onto his face with bile-green thread. At this point,
however, his vision was reduced to one precariously dangling blue disk.
For years Sarapandy and Musical sat,
leaning companionably on each other, on top of a cupboard in the cellar, part
of the dim jumble of basement scenery.
Then, in the 1960s, the company for
which my dad worked was swallowed up by a much larger one. My parents were
pulled away from the country farmhouse where they’d settled in the 1940s, and
sent to the Midwest in a particularly stupid game of “corporate chess.” Always intending
to return, they rented out the house and kept part of the basement for storage.
As I was helping them prepare for
the move on a visit home from college, I went to the cellar to box up some of
my things, and was amazed to see Sarapandy and Musical still dustily propping
each other up on top of the cupboard. On an impulse, I grabbed Sarapandy and
tucked him into one of the storage boxes.
About 30 years passed.
My dad retired in 1975, and my
parents were once more happily ensconced in the farmhouse. I always enjoyed
visiting them from California, where I had settled down. On one of these
visits, in the early 1990s, I went rooting through old storage boxes shoved
into a corner of the cellar, to see if there was stuff I could now dispense
with.
I opened one of them, and there was
Sarapandy, reeking of mildew but otherwise unchanged. When I returned to
California, he went with me, sealed in an odor-proof bag in my suitcase.
Back home, I shampooed him gently
and put him out to dry and air until he no longer smelled like an abandoned
tenement. I sewed up the gaps where his kapok stuffing had begun to show, sent
away for a pair of warm brown teddy-bear eyes, attached them firmly, and
embroidered him a brand-new nose.
On finishing this last project,
which required a bit of gathering and re-shaping of his time-flattened face, I
noticed that his original black-stitchery mouth had spontaneously acquired a
sweet little smile. (One paw permanently raised as if in benediction was
apparently his own idea.)
All cleaned up, with a new face,
Sarapandy sat in a rocking chair as a kind of conversation-piece echo of my
childhood.
Then life changed abruptly. I was
involved in an accident that shattered my left leg and broke my left arm in
three places. After six days of emergency care, I found myself in a hospital
bed in my kind neighbors’ home while my little cabin was being made invalid-
and wheelchair-friendly.
I was still shaken and having
nightmares, so on my first day out of the hospital, my friend Eileen brought Sarapandy
over from my cabin and tucked him in next to me. “He said he wanted to come see
you,” she said.
For a second, my old fear of rolling
over and smothering him surfaced, until I realized, almost with relief, that
with bulky leg and arm casts, I couldn’t roll over at all.
Sitting beside me in the hospital
bed, Sarapandy was my constant comfort and companion for months as my bones
mended. When my casts came off and the bed went away, I returned him to the
rocking chair. I could feel him staring at me intensely, calmly, but with a
hint of reproach.
“I might smother you,” I said.
“I don’t care,” he said.
We compromised. To this day he has
his very own pillow, safely out of rolling range but close enough. The
Velveteen Rabbit had it right. It took over half a lifetime, but Sarapandy and
I finally became Real.
########################
15. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Bangor or Pen
Argyl, Pennsylvania, Mid-1950s
FIFTIES TIME CAPSULE: BOBBIE’S WEDDING
Can you find me in this photo?
This is a between-the–formal-shots
outtake from the wedding of my Aunt Roberta “Bobbie” Arnts to Gerry Prouty.
Aunt Bobbie, of course, is smiling center stage in traditional white, her new
bridegroom just behind her. She was the youngest of the nine Arnts sisters and
the last to marry.
At left is my sister Susan as an
adorable junior bridesmaid at around 14 or 15 years old, looking grownup in
tea-length blue, and no doubt conscious of her position as the oldest of the
growing tribe of Arnts first cousins, which would eventually top out at 22.
I’m not sure who the other blue
bridesmaid is, but the Matron of Honor cracking up in pink is my delightful
Aunt Madeleine. The other attendants are probably Gerry’s relatives. No
ring-bearers or flower girls (too many candidates), no fancy band or flashy DJ,
and nary a bridezilla moment.
Of the guys, I recognize my handsome
Uncle Fritz, beaming second from left. His wife, my Aunt Janet, sang a lovely
“O Promise Me” (The Fifties wedding-song equivalent of Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect,”
or other top nuptial hits of today) during the ceremony.
Two uncles, John Arnts (the only boy
in a family of ten) and Madeleine’s husband Chase are the last two on the
right.
And where was I? Somewhere behind
the photographer, barefoot, aged 11 or so, my hair tangled from romping with
the younger cousins, utterly goggle-eyed at the glamor of it all.
Oh yes, and a bit later, having been
herded into a scrum of unmarried girls, I wound up catching Bobbie’s tossed
bridal bouquet, making me theoretically the next in line to get married.
Well, so much for that myth.
(Thanks to Cousin Bob Arnts for the
photo)
#####################
16. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s
Hill, Pennsylvania, 1954
PENNSYLVANIA TOM THUMB WEDDING; Or
MY VERY FIRST TIME The photo is a sepia-faded monochrome of what looks like a large wedding party. The celebrants are grouped on a railed-in church altar platform backed by a larger-than-life-size stock reproduction painting of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.
All the predictable wedding
characters are there, bride, groom, preacher, preacher's wife, bridesmaids,
ushers, doting parents, all of us outfitted to the teeth in full formal wedding
regalia; all of us gazing solemnly or smilingly or smirkingly into the camera;
all of us, for the most part, children.
The “Mock Wedding,” or “Tom Thumb
Wedding” was a fad ignited in 1863 by the P.T. Barnum-engineered nuptials of
two “little people,” Charles Sherman Stratton, aka “General Tom Thumb” and a
diminutive former schoolteacher, Lavinia Bump Warren.
The
original Tom Thumb Wedding. The attendants were a little person known
as “Commodore Nutt” and the bride’s younger sister, Minnie.
The copycat versions were
essentially an odd leftover from those days before radio and TV and cars, when
people in remote country areas still made their own entertainments among
themselves—barn dances and church socials and spelling or quilting bees. A
time, to hear the old people talk about it, of unbridled inventiveness and
untrammeled good fun.
As for this particular ceremonial, I
have no idea why it came to pass, taking place as it did in the 1950s with
radio going strong and nearly everyone having cars to drive to the movies, and
television sets beginning to appear in ordinary people's homes, no longer an
arcane technology in science exhibitions but something you could actually go
out and buy in a store.
At any rate, you'd have thought the
Blue Church Ladies would have had better things to do in their spare time,
never mind that most of them were already hard-working house- and-farmwives.
At this event, "Tom
Thumb," who was portrayed here by a handsome half-pint hellion named Buddy
Schippers, was to take to wife "Miss Jenny June;" this plum role was
awarded to Mary Stackhouse, a tiny shy blonde child with an appealing overbite
and a faint mouse-squeak of a voice.
The rest of us were assigned
willy-nilly the roles of bridesmaids, best man, maid of honor, ushers, preacher
(an older boy whose voice had changed early), mother of the bride (my big
sister Susan), and assorted other relatives and hangers-on. The bride’s younger
brother, little Frankie Stackhouse, barely out of diapers and, if possible,
shyer than his sister, was drafted as ring-bearer.
 Georgie Brotzman (who would grow so large and aggressive that he was nicknamed “Battler,”) is second from right and Billy Schippers is at far right. I can still name all but a handful of these people.
The service was a heavy-handed
parody of an actual marriage ceremony, God-lite, but peppered with sly
references to the “bride’s” lack of cooking ability, and the “groom’s” tendency
to stay out late with his buddies playing cards. Even to my young ears, it
sounded lame, but the adults seemed to find it hilarious.
My mother, who disliked sewing
almost as much as she did cooking (though she did both gamely and well),
gallantly assembled floor-length taffeta dresses for Susan and me from
identical patterns. Mine was light turquoise blue, Susan’s a matronly purple
that did nothing for the brief (and only) awkward stage she was then going through
on her way to Prom Queen.
Sue
Since at the age of ten I much
preferred climbing trees to dressing up myself or dolls, and could essentially
beat up every boy in my class at school who picked on me or my friends, I
viewed all this dressmaking and fussing with the whites of my eyes showing.
It wasn’t until the other girls in
my fourth-grade class at Hopewell School — including my classroom rival Leslie
Salisbury, who not only had naturally curly hair, but took singing lessons and
ballet classes and had brought her pink satin toe shoes to school one day for
us all to envy — began to talk excitedly about their dresses and roles and
hairdos, that I realized that this shindig would be a lot more fun if I decided
to get with the program instead of, as I’d planned, wrapping myself in a mantle
of disdain.
To my chagrin, once the dress
rehearsal began, I realized that I’d been cast as one of four
identically-dressed bridesmaids, and had to step-pause down the aisle holding
the pudgy elbow of Georgie Brotzman, while Lesley Salisbury got to be maid of
honor in pale-yellow satin and drift arm-in-arm just ahead of us with the best
man, Billy Schippers.
Lesley
Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy. Black curly
hair, bright blue eyes, porcelain prepubescent skin, agile athletic body,
barely a sign at that point that he was going to go through high-school as one
of those sullen ducktailed leather-jacketed cigarette-smoking “shop boys"
hardly ever seen in academic classes.
Billy
An older cousin of the groom, Billy
at age 10 had the kind of insouciant long-lashed je ne sais quoi that sets the
hearts of bridesmaids fluttering anywhere in the world.
I had had to beat Billy up several
times the year before (he was taller, I was wirier and more determined), but
this year I had, for some undetermined reason, refrained from doing so.
At this point, I only knew that his
walking with Lesley Salisbury annoyed me in some fundamental way. As the dress
rehearsal proceeded, in fits and starts, punctuated by the bride’s bursting
into tears, the ring-bearer wetting his velvet pants, and the sound of mothers
repeatedly rounding up running kids and smacking them into docility, I began to
revert to my earlier view of the whole proceeding — an annoying waste of time.
Georgie
Thus, on the night, I was pretty
much unwillingly wrangled into my newly ironed dress after hours of walking
around with my hair in clanking metal curlers. I’d been been powdered and
prinked and told not to sit down, and watched Susan fall apart over how stupid
she thought she looked wearing her glasses with her mother-of-the-bride
headgear.
When my father cornered me to record
the moment for posterity, I was, if possible, even less thrilled about posing
for his camera than about the whole dumb pseudo-religious girly evening ahead
of me.
'nuff said.
We arrived at the church early,
finding the basement dressing room already hot and stuffy and chaotic, with
frantic mothers greasing down their sons’ cowlicks or affixing moon-shaped pads
to the armpits of their daughters’ dresses to prevent telltale rings of nervous
perspiration.
It was really more than I could
stand, and on some flimsy pretext I escaped outside for a breath of air. It was
a lovely starlit night, with a new moon rising, and I wandered around to the
back of the church, enjoying the contrast between the cool darkness and the
bursting bright noise inside the building.
I saw a movement to one side of me,
and realized that I’d been joined by another night shadow, a slim figure
dressed in one of the glamorous-looking rented tuxedos provided to all the boys
in the wedding party. His skin was very pale in the faint moonlight, and his
hair very dark.
Wordlessly, Billy Schippers took my
hand, turned me around to face him, kissed me, a little awkwardly, on the
mouth, then disappeared back in the direction of the dressing-room door.
Somebody eventually called my name
and yelled that the wedding was about to get started. I walked back inside and
took my place next to Georgie Brotzman, noticing how the black hair curled
sweetly behind the ears of Lesley Salisbury’s escort just ahead of us.
As we began to process unsteadily
forward to the swelling sound of the organ, between one step and the next I
suddenly understood what all the damn fuss was about weddings.
###################
17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco,
California, and All Around the World; 1970s-Present
RAY JASON: FIRE, ICE, GIANT CHICKENS
AND PHILOSOPHY;
TRANSCENDING THE PILLSBURY DOUGHBOY
Back in the early 1970s, I was asked
to do a California Living story on a new and growing phenomenon: San Francisco
street entertainers.
In the process, I interviewed a
number of them, including a soft-spoken fellow named Eugene Raymond Smith, who,
performing as “Ray Smith,” was one of the city’s earliest and most popular
street artists (he was the first licensed street juggler in San Francisco), and
a master of his art.
Ray with musician Doug McKechnie, who introduced me to him.
Though diminutive in size,
fair-skinned, freckled and sandy-haired (he jokingly claimed to come from
the same gene pool as the Pillsbury Doughboy), Ray was a show-stopping
performer, somehow managing to convince audience after audience that he was
actually tall, dark, more than slightly dangerous, and the true spiritual heir
of Zorro.
He was a constantly evolving
performer, always delivering a stream of extremely clever patter while juggling
everything from apples to rubber chickens, sharpened sickles, hatchets,
machetes, flaming torches, and bowling balls.
To give you an idea of Ray’s range
of talent, a few quotes from a 1984 article “Ray Jason: the Guru of Street
Juggling,” by Nancy Levidow:
"…Juggling flaming torches
blindfolded is [Ray’s] pride and joy, although cascading three 14-pound bowling
balls comes in a close second. Also among his repertoire is tap-dancing while
juggling; juggling with five balls or four basketballs; and eating an apple
while riding a unicycle and juggling two hatchets.
"Besides doing a verbal act,
[Jason] also has a purely visual act that plays well to the crowds in the upper
tier in a large stadium… After performing half-time shows at 10 games each
season, in 1979 he earned the title of Official Juggler of the San Francisco
Forty-Niners Football Team.’
"Jason is now working on a new
balancing sequence he hopes to perform at the Super Bowl, should the
Forty-Niners make it through the play-offs. He balances a stepladder on various
places on his arms and head, climbs the stepladder with a torch balanced on his
nose, juggles on one foot on top of the stepladder, and ends lying on his back
on top of the ladder and juggling torches upwards over his head."
But all that came later. Shortly
before I turned my story in to California Living back in the 70s, Ray got in
touch. He was feeling, it seemed, that “Ray Smith” lacked a certain panache,
and wondered if I would be willing to instead feature him in my story as “Ray
Jason.”
“Much better,” I said.
Ray and I turned out to be kindred
spirits; both of us performed in the Renaissance and Dickens Fair(e)s and knew
many of the same people. We had similar off-center senses of humor and
adventure, and became roving sidekicks with inside-joke stage names: I was
“Pantherina Fernandez;” he was “Lance Flashmuffin.”
Ray was to be featured in two more
of my California Living stories; in one of them, I related our adventures in
learning to ride a unicycle (the hard way); in another, entitled “Diary of a
Dickens Fairy,” the two of us appeared in the lead photo, Ray as “Dr. W. W.
Whipple, the Eccentric Juggler,” and me as the good doctor’s giant-chicken
assistant/nemesis. We also both appeared in barely-clad scenes in the “Naughty
French Postcard Tableaux Vivants.”
...and also falling off of one wheel.
As I got to know Ray, his remarkable
past history unfolded bit by bit: he had earned a degree in political science;
learned juggling from a clown on the back lot of a Georgia Circus; served in
the Navy in Vietnam; had been accepted into law school at Columbia University
but decided to become a juggler instead.
On moving to San Francisco, outside
of his street-performing vocation, he became the city’s pool champion for a
number of years. He confessed that he had once written a thick novel, but on
re-reading, decided it was trash and ceremoniously tossed it off the Golden
Gate Bridge.
A few years after we met, Ray took
up traveling. First he juggled and adventured his way around the country in
Prince Boffo, his “Trome” (Jasonese for Truck/home), hanging out with author
Tom Robbins and swamp-tromping with his idol Kurt Vonnegut. Next, he traveled
around the world, with just “a backpack and a bag of tricks.” (He left with
$4000 and returned with $4400.)
And then he fell in love.
Her name was Aventura, a
vintage Farallon 29 sailboat; he meticulously restored her and sailed away,
going solo around the world, supporting himself by juggling and selling tales
of his adventures to sailing magazines.
Aventura in dry dock before the first voyage.
Ray found the seagoing life so much
to his liking that it has now become a full-time gig for him. In 2010, a
collection of his tales of the “sea-gypsy” lifestyle appeared on Amazon: Tales
of a Sea Gypsy- R#1330907, followed in 2015 by The Sea Gypsy Philosopher:
Uncommon Essays from a Thoughtful Wanderer.
And then, in the summer of 2017,
just when we all thought Ray might be settling down peacefully into his seventh
decade, he joined a four-person expedition taking a 42-foot fiberglass sailboat
through the fabled Northwest Passage from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Nome,
Alaska, an icy and extremely dangerous journey lasting 86 consecutive days. He
very nearly didn’t return, but lived to blog about his adventure.
 Sadly, it’s been years since I saw
Ray in person, although we keep in touch via email and said blog, The Sea Gypsy Philosopher, where he extols and describes his seafaring lifestyle in essays
that range from “soft” (delightful tales of his adventures and local color) to
“hard” (no-nonsense polemics in which the words “malevolent overlords”
frequently appear). 
Ray as he appears today.
While I miss my old sidekick, I’m
happy to know that he’s out there, probably somewhere in the Caribbean,
literally sailing into the sunset of his golden years.
With, of course, panache.
Awhile back, Ray asked me to do a
calligraphy design, based on his credo.
It read": “Help Many; Harm None;
Be AMAZED.”
I am, Flashmuffin, I am.
###################
18. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Northern California renaissance Pleasure Faires; Mid-1960s to 1970s SCOTT BEACH, RENAISSANCE DUDE (1931-1996)  A (former) Fulbright scholar, wordsmith, stage and screen actor, (American Graffiti, The Right Stuff, Stand By Me, Mrs. Doubtfire), voice-over actor (THX-1138, Star Wars, the Charlie Brown specials), producer, director, singer, musician, songwriter, and beloved radio personality, Scott not only always seemed slightly larger than life, but was also a kind, funny, rascally, generous, and truly nice man. As the Lord Mayor, magnificent in overdone velvet-and-plumes, he brought to his big-fish/small-pond role a perfect-pitch mixture of clueless pomposity, self-importance, and gravitas, all the while keeping huge unwieldy spectacles like the Queen’s Show moving along, balancing his fellow performers’ unpredictable spontaneity with faultless ad-libbing and near-flawless timing.
Here’s one of my favorite Scott Beach moments: one evening in the mid-1970s, he and I were walking together as the Faire was closing and patrons and participants alike were drifting slowly down the wooded valley toward the front gate. Near us, a group of four or five singers broke into the lovely round “Joan, Come Kiss Me Now,” simplicity itself: Joan, come kiss me now Once again, for my love, gentle Joan, come kiss me now. (If you’re curious, this is one version of what it sounds like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YejysbPXUj4
(Joan, Come Kiss Me Now)
Scott joined in, I joined in, and soon there were 30-40 singers, many of them with trained voices, blocking traffic and singing in the golden late-afternoon light. Then Scott stepped up onto a straw bale and began to conduct. With precise and subtle movements of hands and arms, he took the round up to eight parts and condensed it backwards into a single melody/harmony line. From there he re-constructed the whole song, playing the impromptu choir like an instrument, switching parts around, moving through piano, forte, crescendo, diminuendo, legato, sforzando, pizzicato, pianissimo, finally gathering the whole thing into one sumptuous final chord, which he drew out gloriously, endlessly, and then snipped off precisely with just two fingers. With a tip of his plumed hat, he smiled sweetly, stepped off of the straw bale, and continued on his way, leaving singers and spectators alike in amazed silence. We miss you, Scott. https://www.nerf-herders-anonymous.com/p/beach-scott.html
(Scott Beach profile)
19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Marin County & Los Angeles, California; c.1969-75: SURVIVING THE TOAD One of the earliest musical groups to perform at the original Renaissance Pleasure Faires in California was a protean aggregation known collectively as the Golden Toad.
At the time of which I write, there were about half-a-dozen Toad personnel regularly working the Faires, including Bob Thomas, his sidekick Will Spires on fiddle, and several other gifted musical pranksters. They were seasoned old Faire hands, hip and cool, and a force of nature. I was not.
As Harvest Maid, for example, I would be drawn through the Faire in a decorated haycart, waving and smiling and flirting, accompanied by a retinue of roistering garlanded lads and lasses.
Assuming I was no more than the role I played, certain members of the Golden Toad began addressing me as “Poopsie” at every opportunity, in tones ranging from teasing to patronizing to downright mean. At first I felt bewildered, then bullied, then angry, then resigned; eventually I learned to respond with a sweetly dismissive smile while mentally flipping them the bird.
Some years later, after I’d gotten to know Bob Thomas a bit, I asked him: “What ever happened to that “Poopsie” thing? Why did it stop?’ Bob was silent for a moment, then: “Remember the time when you were May Queen and the guys who usually played for your dance didn’t show up, and they asked us to fill in?” “Vaguely,” I said. “Well,” said Bob, "we thought this was a chance to really “Poopsie” you. We decided to play the most un-danceable music we could think of, some obscure Macedonian shepherd thing with a weird rhythm and impossible time signature.” “Really?” I said, “I don’t remember that. What did I do?’ Bob gave me a funny wry grin and a little shrug. “You danced.” he said. 
##############
19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, June 30th, 2003; Easton, Pennsylvania, July 8th, 1776 and May 8th, 1945
REMEMBRANCE OF RINGS PAST: ON THE IRONY OF ICONS
Susan and I with my mother on V-E Day.
In late June of 2003, my dad, upon
reading an article about the old Northampton County Courthouse in Easton, PA,
was moved to write a letter to my sister Sue:
“As the Fourth of July approaches,
I was remembering the day in 1945 that World War II ended in Europe.
“Word had come that the original
‘liberty bell’ that had rung in the old County Courthouse to celebrate the
signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, was going to be rung
continuously in the new (1861) courthouse for 24 hours by way of celebration.
We decided to participate in this marathon ringing.
“A rope extended from the belfry
to the courthouse lobby, in which a huge line of people had assembled. We stood
in line for hours. Several times we almost gave up, but having invested so much
time, we decided to stick it out.
“Several years earlier, I had
visited the more famous but less authentic Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. In
those days I was able, not only to touch it, but to rap it to make it ring. My
feelings on that day did not begin to approach those of the time when our
entire family celebrated the end of a long and devastating war.”—Howard Hill
As I (Amie) was only about six months
old on that occasion, I consulted my sister Sue, older by three years, who remembers standing and
waiting for hours among far too many people for comfort, and then feeling a bit
cheated when (for obvious practical reasons), instead of getting to actually
ring the bell, each person was only allowed to put his or her hand on the rope
as a hefty guy did the actual continuous ringing.
“I really wasn’t aware of a war
going on” she writes, “so on VE Day I got swept up in the excitement from the
adults, not because of any relief I experienced that the war was over. I do
remember we had room-darkening shades on our windows, even in the kitchen, so
that any enemy planes that might fly over would not see lights.“
(I—Amie again—remember a chart that hung on the kitchen wall, showing the silhouettes-from-below of enemy planes that might be spotted.)
My dad spent the rest of that day
putting the finishing touches on a wading pool he constructed below our
farmhouse from the foundation of a former smokehouse. As he smoothed the last
layer of its cement covering, he had Susan and me commemorate the occasion in
our own small way—Susan’s handprints and my tiny footprints with the date: May
8th, 1945.
Like my dad, I once got to see and
touch the Liberty Bell, during a school or family trip to Philadelphia’s
Independence Hall. My strongest memory was of the way the area surrounding the
fabled crack had been polished by the reverent hands of countless visitors.
(The bell is now sequestered in a glass case.)
SOME NOTES ON CELEBRATION
Although the Declaration of
Independence is dated July 4th, it took several days to get 500 broadside
copies made and carried to the cities and towns of the colonies.
Of its numerous destinations, only
three had the collective courage to read it out loud in public: New York City,
Trenton, NJ, and the small town of Easton (four miles from our house), whose ladies also crafted a “Liberty
Flag” of somewhat unusual design (below) to fly on the occasion.
Reproduction
of the "Easton Stars and Stripes," from 1776, made of linen on Russian
silk. The original is on display in the Easton Library.
This was on July 8th, 1776, and
the courthouse bell, crafted by Moravian bellfounders in nearby Bethlehem in
1768, was rung lustily in celebration.
The
mural in the Northampton County Courthouse depicts Robert Levers
reading the Declaration of Independence. Note the original flag design.
July 8th is now celebrated as
Heritage Day in Easton, and the scene is re-enacted each year, with a
descendent of the original reader, Robert Levers, doing the honors.
A STUDY IN IRONY
The Easton bell tolled long and
faithfully for over two centuries, through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the
Civil War, World Wars I and II, and many events in between, signaling alarms, gatherings, victories and celebrations.
Its use waned with greater ease of communication in the 20th century, and it was finally honorably
retired during a courthouse renovation in the mid-2000s. It now sits in in the
rotunda in relative obscurity, rung only on ceremonial occasions.
The Easton "Liberty Bell," founded in 1768 (Photo by Nowella Yerby.)
And here's the irony: so obscure has this distinguished bell become that,
unable to find a photo of it online, even in the Northampton County Museum
archives, I was only able to obtain the image above by persuading a
good-natured courthouse employee to snap a photo with her cellphone and email
it to me. There's not even a bronze plaque, just a paper flyer identifying it
to visitors.
In contrast, the celebrated
“Liberty Bell” (so-called because of its Biblical inscription: "Proclaim
LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants
Thereof"—Leviticus 25:10) was cast in England in 1752 of inferior
materials and promptly cracked the first time it was rung on arrival in
Philadelphia, where it was to hang in the State House (now Independence Hall).
The Liberty Bell, showing the touch of many hands, is on display in its glass case in Philadelphia.
It was re-cast (with more inferior
materials, pewter and lead instead of copper), and city officials scheduled a
public celebration with free food and drink for its testing. “When the bell was
struck,” according to a contemporary account, “it did not break, but the sound
produced was described by one hearer as like two coal scuttles being banged
together.”
Cast for a third time, and then
distinguished only by its position in the belfry of the State House, the bell
actually spent most of the period of the Revolutionary War in hiding (passing
through Easton and Bethlehem on its way to a church cellar in Allentown). Like
all of Philadelphia’s large bells, it was moved for fear it would be melted
down by the occupying British forces for munitions.
Restored to the State House in
1785, the not-yet-Liberty Bell tolled in relative obscurity as a working
bell until it cracked yet again sometime between 1817 and 1846. Historians
aren’t sure, possibly because nobody cared enough to keep track.
Then in the late 1830s, the
admittedly handsome bell with its cool Biblical quotation was adopted as a
symbol by abolitionist societies, who dubbed it the "Liberty Bell."
It started to attain its current
fame only after an 1847 short story by one George Lippard claimed that an aged
bellringer rang it spontaneously on July 4, 1776, upon hearing of the Second
Continental Congress's vote for independence.
CC2
Despite the fact that the story
was a complete and utter fabrication, the tale was widely accepted as true, even by some
historians, and found its way into schoolbooks of the time. And the legend
grew. And grew.
So there you have it: the Easton
bell is venerable, plain, faithfully serviceable and obscure; the Liberty Bell
is flashy and flawed, its near-religious-icon status created, at least in part,
by hype and imagination.
Nothing new under the sun.
#############################
End of Part Seven: More to come
ALL MY BLOGS TO DATE
MEMOIRS (This is not as daunting as it looks. Each section contains 20 short essays, ranging in length from a few paragraphs to a few pages. Great bathroom reading. They’re not in sequential order, so one can start anywhere.)
NOTE: If you prefer to read these on paper, you can highlight/copy/paste into a Word doc and print them out, (preferably two-sided or on the unused side of standard-sized paper).
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part One https://amiehillthrowbackthursdays.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Two https://ahilltbt2.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Three https://amiehilltbt3.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Four https://tbt4amie-hill.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Five https://ami-ehiltbt-5.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Six https://am-iehilltbt6.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Seven https://a-miehilltbt7.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Eight https://a-miehilltbt8.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Nine https://amiehilltbt9.blogspot.com/
********************************* ILLUSTRATED ADVENTURES IN VERSE
NEW! FLYING TIME; OR, THE WINGS OF KAYLIN SUE (2020) https://amiehillflyingtime.blogspot.com/ (38 lines, 17 illustrations)
TRE & THE ELECTRO-OMNIVOROUS GOO (2018) http://the-electroomnivorousgoo.blogspot.com/2018/05/an-adventure-in-verse.html (160 lines, 26 illustrations)
DRACO& CAMERON (2017) http://dracoandcameron.blogspot.com/ (36 lines, 18 illustrations)
CHRISTINA SUSANNA (1984/2017) https://christinasusanna.blogspot.com/ (168 lines, 18 illustrations)
OBSCURELY ALPHABETICAL & D IS FOR DYLAN (2017) (1985) https://obscurelyalphabetical.blogspot.com/ (41 lines, 8 illustrations)
************************************** ARTWORK
AMIE HILL: CALLIGRAPHY & DRAWINGS https://amiehillcalligraphy.blogspot.com/
AMIE HILL: COLLAGES 1https://amiehillcollages1.blogspot.com/
*********************************** LIBERA HISTORICAL TIMELINE (2007-PRESENT) For Part One (introduction to Libera and to the Timeline, extensive overview & 1981-2007), please go to: http://liberatimeline.blogspot.com/ |
